P.S. Support for displaying podcast enclosures is probably going to be coming soon so you’ll be able to play or download non-embedded audio and video podcast files directly in your browser. But that is probably for another night, since it will involve hacking on the MagpieRSS RSS feed parser a little bit so it knows that enclosures exist.

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So the guy who came up with WiFi, Expedia, Exterra tells all about the importance of naming.
Is a good name a important to success? What about bad names? They highlight the name iPod as a bad name, but the product is so awesome it didn’t matter. I’m about half-way through this video, and it actually has my attention (as you know, this is a big deal if you can keep my attention). So … before I have to go out and this post falls into the “almost done” status … I’m just going to post because man, this is too interesting not too!

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If you’ve ever tried to get your website featured on the front page of a site like digg, reddit, or Slashdot you might have felt frustration when you didn’t get the right number of votes to make it.

There is a site called RSS2.com that will automatically put your website’s content directly on its homepage.

How to get onto the homepage

Here are the 3 easy steps for you to take to get your website featured on the homepage of RSS2.com:

Go to the site and make sure that your RSS feed is in the database. The easiest way to do this is to paste in the URL for your RSS feed into the “Read a Feed” input box at the bottom of the page.

Verify that your existing site RSS feed was imported correctly. You should be forwarded to the page that shows you your feed’s page on RSS2.com if it was imported successfully. (For example, the page for this site is http://rss2.com/feeds/Gabriel)

Publish a new item on your website. RSS feeds are updated every 5 minutes so you should only have to wait for a minute or two. Refresh your feed page until you see your new item appear. Now check the homepage. Your new item should be at the top of the list, and will remain until 9 newer items are published by other people in their RSS feeds.

Bonus tip #1 – how to get into the top 30 feeds list

If you want to make it into the top 30 feed list (featured at the top of every page), all you have to do is tell people about your RSS2.com page that features your feed and increase your view count. The easiest way to do this is to use the RSS feed stats widget at the bottom of your feed page (copy and paste the HTML into your blog sidebar or another HTML page) — note that your site must allow <script> tags to enable the live updates of your RSS2.com feed stats information. You can also promote yourself to the top 30 by linking to your feed page in your blog roll and by sending the link to your friends.

Bonus tip #2 – Pretty site icon

To have your site icon show up nicely in the all feeds page and in the explore lists make sure you have a favicon installed for your website. RSS2.com will look for that and use it for your site icon. If it doesn’t find one, it will use a generic one that doesn’t set your site apart from any of the other ones. See the Wikipedia entry on favicons for how to get one installed for your site if you don’t already have one.

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If you like what I’ve been working on for RSS2.com, feel free to digg this submission and help get it linked on the home page. Let’s see if we can melt the server. 🙂

This new RSS feed aggregator site makes reading sites like digg fast and easy, with no clutter or distractions. There are 690 other feeds to read that are also available on the site. A really good resource for finding fresh new stories, focused on technology, design, and cool hunting.

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You can now see stats for each feed on RSS2.com and grab the HTML code to embed a neat small badge that shows you how many times the feed has been read on RSS2.com, how many people have favorited it and how many items are available to read on RSS2.com. The badges are displayed at the bottom of every feed page.

Chickenfoot is a Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser’s sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing. In Chickenfoot, scripts are written in a superset of Javascript that includes special functions specific to web tasks.

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I just added another nice feature to RSS2.com: Persistent user sign in. This means that you won’t have to keep on logging in every time you restart your browser. Click the “Remember me” checkbox to stay signed in for the next 100 days.

This will become more important as new user-focused features are added to the site.

Paging
You can now page through older items than just the latest 10 items. This is a pretty nice enhancement. This way you can get caught up.

Top 30
The top 30 most popular feeds are now displayed instead of just the top 25.

OPML Export
If you want to grab a copy of the OPML file that contains all of the subscribed feeds you can get it on the feeds page.

Latest stats:

Also on the technical backend, I improved the speed of a couple of the SQL queries and also implemented 301 redirects for any requests made to www.rss2.com (meaning that if a user types in www.rss2.com they’ll be redirected to rss2.com without the www). Paging nerdly McNerdlington…